The 20th annual Rural Roundup was held in Winnemucca March 24-26, 2010. More than 220 rural tourism partners attended the conference. The program included keynote speakers from Google and Destination Development and breakout sessions about enhanced social media skills, tour operator relationships and itinerary building techniques, to list a few of the topics covered. View more photos on our Flickr account.
To support the efforts of our partners in promoting travel to Nevada, we attended monthly and quarterly meetings of the six territories and hosted in-house training for NCOT staff with product/partner presentations by the Nevada Wedding Association, the Virginia & Truckee Railroad Association and Western Discovery.
We partnered with territory representatives for representation at large consumer travel and adventure shows in Las Vegas, Laughlin, Quartzsite, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Booths were staffed and statewide collateral was distributed to potential travelers, travel agents and journalists. In addition, we marketed to the domestic and international tourism and travel industry at the American Bus Association Marketplace, the United Motorcoach Association EXPO, the Go West Summit and ITB in Berlin.
A seven-day German ski familiarization tour was hosted in the Reno-Tahoe area that included four travel writers, five tour operators, NCOT’s representative from Germany and a representative from American Airlines. Staff also participated in the LVCVA sales mission to Mexico. Presentations were made to travel agents and wholesale tour operators in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey.
The application process for the FY11 1st Cycle Marketing Grant occurred during the end of this quarter. We assisted tourism-related organizations and communities from around the state that applied for funding to further their local and regional marketing and promotional strategies.